For three decades, developers have tried to build a new town at the foot of Friant Dam. On Tuesday, Fresno County supervisors may finally approve one, based on a water plan built on a claim the federal government says is false.
Friant Ranch is a billion-dollar new town proposal just south of the community of Friant, aiming to grow to the size of the city of Fowler. To get through a drought, the county says, the new town can count on a multi-year supply of water stored in Millerton Lake.
But the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which controls releases from the lake, told Fresnoland that isn’t so. Water can be held behind the dam for only one year, not several, according to David Hyatt, the Bureau’s resource management division chief.
“Under Reclamation’s Friant Division rescheduling guidelines, rescheduled Class 1 water [what Friant Ranch relies on] cannot be carried over through multiple consecutive water years,” Hyatt wrote in an email.
That leaves Friant Ranch’s water supply in limbo during a multi-year drought like the one in 2014 and 2015, a Fresnoland investigation shows. If such a scenario were to happen again, public officials could be left scrambling to find an emergency water supply for thousands of people.
The paper-water problem traces to the county’s planning department, which has a history of approving foothill subdivisions whose water systems later failed.
From Mirabella to Shaver Springs, Fresno County has asked for state bailouts for one subdivision after another. County-approved supplies have gone dry; some turned up uranium. Residents are often left in distress, wondering who will answer for the county’s planning failures.
With Friant Ranch, the county never formally analyzed the storage scheme, sparing itself the work that would have exposed the problem. Its only water supply analysis, done in 2008 for the project’s environmental review, predates the scheme by eight years.
The county once promised an updated water supply assessment, then dropped the commitment, reasoning it wasn’t technically required to do a new one. Since then, it has leaned on a 2022 memo from the developer’s own consultant.
The county’s public works department and its communications office did not respond to multiple phone calls and texts.
Friant Ranch still maintains it can store a multi-year supply.
“We get to carry over double the amount we used in the prior year, which basically gives us a two-year water supply,” said Bryan Wagner, a lawyer for Friant Ranch.
The Bureau confirmed that the carryover can happen only for one year.
“Unused rescheduled water cannot be rescheduled again into a subsequent water year,” Hyatt wrote.
The Bureau declined to discuss the risks to Friant Ranch’s water supply further, saying those questions belong to Fresno County.
“Land-use decisions and evaluation of supporting water supply assumptions are the responsibility of local authorities,” Bureau spokesperson Mary Knecht wrote.
Inside Fresno’s paper water problem
The county’s reliance on a stale analysis has roots in how the Valley has long handled water.
For generations, developers and farmers in the San Joaquin Valley ignored hard questions about water and drought, assuming they could pump groundwater in a pinch. Some defied the drought entirely, firing up their pumps and expanding their acreage even as rain and snow dwindled.
But after a string of water crises over the last 20 years, that old fallback is largely off the table. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, now restricts pumping, and state law requires that a large subdivision’s water supply be shown to hold up through a multi-year drought.
Friant Ranch’s developer tried to adapt to these new realities, but the county never checked whether the plan would work.
Friant Ranch’s developers grew concerned after the 2012-2016 drought, when their main supply, Class 1 water from Millerton Lake secured under a 2011 deal with the Lower Tule River Irrigation District, a farm district 80 miles south, went dry two years in a row.
Those zero years were “on everybody’s mind at the time after 2014, 2015,” said Wagner, the lawyer for the developer.
And the water wasn’t cheap: $300,000 just to reserve it, then $400 an acre-foot every year on top of Lower Tule’s own costs.
So in 2016, Wagner’s team amended the deal to protect that investment, turning Millerton Lake into a giant water piggy bank. Each year, Lower Tule would ask the Bureau to hold over twice the water Friant Ranch had purchased, so that, on the developer’s reading, a two years’ supply would always sit behind the dam.
“We wanted to make sure that we had a really strong water supply,” Wagner said. “We keep rolling over, so there’s always two years in the carryover bank account or whatever you want to call it.”
Ultimately, the plan ran up against the limits of Friant Dam’s control of nature.
Millerton Lake holds less than a third of the San Joaquin River’s average yearly flow, so the water behind the dam is drawn down every year to make room for next year’s run. As the Bureau of Reclamation put it in 2003, “there is little opportunity to carry over water from one season to another.”
For this reason, an engineer at Provost & Pritchard, the firm that wrote Friant Ranch’s water assessment, had warned against using Millerton Lake as a bulwark against multi-year drought.
“[T]here is little reliance on reservoir surface storage to carry water over from year to year,” the engineer wrote in a 2007 internal memo, “given the limited amount of capacity in these reservoirs and the reservoir space reserved for the flood control function that controls their operations in the winter and spring of each year.”
It is unclear why that advice went unheeded by Friant Ranch’s team. The 2016 amendment was not signed off by the Bureau of Reclamation, according to a copy of the contract reviewed by Fresnoland. The Bureau declined to say whether it was ever consulted about the amendment.
So why didn’t the county catch the error?
County retracted promise to reanalyze water supply
For a while, it seemed the county might. Then it strayed.
In 2014, with the drought at its worst, Fresno County said it would take a second look at Friant Ranch’s water supply, promising an updated analysis, according to a public notice.
Then a lawsuit narrowed what the county chose to revisit. After the California Supreme Court threw out Friant Ranch’s air quality analysis in 2018, the county limited its redo to only what the court ordered.
In a 2021 notice, it dropped its promise to recheck the water as well. Pointing to the 2016 amendment, the county called an updated analysis “no longer necessary in light of the improved level of water supply reliability associated with the project applicant’s current contractual arrangements,” which it said gave the town “ample water supply.”
As a result, Friant Ranch’s water supply was never reanalyzed, its assumption of a multi-year piggy bank never battle-tested in a public process.
What the county has relied on since then is an informal memo. In July 2022, Provost & Pritchard, the same consulting firm whose engineer had warned against banking on Millerton in 2007, sent Friant Ranch an update that turned the 2016 amendment into a four-year reserve.
The 2016 deal, it said, “requires LTRID to carry over … up to 4,000 AF of water or approximately four years of estimated Project demand.” The memo also says it isn’t meant to be “a comprehensive water supply assessment.”
The county adopted its conclusion anyway. The staff report going to supervisors Tuesday cites the memo and tells the board the project’s contracts “secure a reliable multi-year surface water supply,” which is described as “more than adequate.”
When the City of Fresno asked in 2023 what would serve the town if 2014 and 2015 happened again, the county didn’t answer. It referred the city to a general statement on the limited scope of its review and wrote that the carryover question “would not affect the conclusion of the Updated WSA,” the analysis built on the 2022 memo.
The county’s 2021 notice points out that a trial court upheld its original water analysis, a ruling that was never appealed. But that analysis predates the 2016 storage plan, which even by the county’s own analysis is crucial for the future of Friant Ranch.
Friant Ranch does have a backup plan, but it may not survive the next drought for similar reasons.
If the piggy bank runs dry, Friant Ranch’s fallback lies with Lower Tule and its rights to an overdrawn river called the Tule River. The area has seen the worst land sinkage in California — more than 7.7 feet since 2015. In 2024, the state put the southern Tulare County area on probation, and pumping there is now metered and charged.
Lower Tule has pledged its “best efforts” to help, by pumping Tule River water into the Friant-Kern Canal for its downstream commitments, freeing up Millerton water for Friant Ranch.
But the swap itself may not hold. In 2007, Friant Ranch’s consultant OK’d relying on Lower Tule’s water on the assumption that growers could fall back on their groundwater wells in dry years. Lower Tule River Irrigation District’s manager, Alex Peltzer, did not return a call seeking comment on the arrangement.
If growers can’t pump their way through a dry year like they used to in the wild west days of no groundwater laws, they’ll need that river water themselves, and Lower Tule likely won’t have any spare river to swap.
And in that scenario, with Friant Ranch’s final fail-safe coming up dry, the scramble to find drinking water for about 7,000 people would begin.
The project goes before the Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
Asked whether he would approve a subdivision that wouldn’t have water in a drought, Supervisor Nathan Magsig, whose district includes the project, declined to give a yes-or-no answer.
“I want to make sure that any project that comes forward that they meet the requirements of the law,” Magsig said. “So as I look at this project… I want to make sure that it checks all the boxes.”
